Dr. Olsen's Bad Trip

The CIA's LSD experiments were conducted on many unwitting subjects, most often black men in prisons or patrons of whorehouses run by the Agency, which had installed two-way mirrors in the establishments to allow for observation of the drug's effects. Some of the MKULTRA subjects who were informed faced even more inhumane treatment: during one experiment in Kentucky, seven volunteers were given LSD for 77 days straight. One of the experiments probably proved fatal. On November 19, 1953, an Army scientist and germ warfare specialist named Frank Olson, who was working on an MKULTRA project, was slipped a solid dose of LSD in his drink. After spending eight days stumbling about in what many observers described as a paranoid, depressed state, Olson jumped through his hotel window in New York and fell tens stories to his death. The Agency covered up its role in Olson's demise, and twenty-two years would pass before Frank Olson's family would learn of the events leading up to his death. When the CIA's acid exploits were made public in the mid-1970s, the Agency found itself facing heavy criticism. One Senate committee put it this way in 1975: "From its beginning in the early 1950s until its termination in 1963, the program of surreptitious administration of LSD to unwitting non-volunteer human subjects demonstrates a failure of the CIA's leadership to pay adequate attention to the rights of individuals and to provide effective guidance to CIA employees. Though it was known that the testing was dangerous, the lives of subjects were placed in jeopardy and were ignored.... Although it was clear that the laws of the United States were being violated, the testing continued."